The Primacy of the Political: A History of Political Thought from the Greeks to the French and American Revolutions

By Dick Howard

The conflict between politics and antipolitics has replayed itself throughout Western history and philosophical thought. Plato's quest for absolute certainty led him to denounce political democracy, an anti-political position later challenged by Aristotle. This back-and-forth exchange came to a head at the time of the American and French revolutions. Through this wide-ranging narrative, Dick Howard throws new light on a recurring philosophical dilemma, proving our political problems are not as unique as we think.

Howard begins with democracy in ancient Greece and the rise and fall of republican politics in Rome. In the wake of Rome's collapse, political thought searched for a new medium, and the conflict between politics and antipolitics reemerged through the contrasting theories of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas. During the Renaissance and the Reformation, the emergence of the modern individual again shifted the terrain. Even so, politics vs. antipolitics dominated the period, frustrating even Machiavelli, who sought to reconceptualize the nature of political thought. Hobbes and Locke, theorists of the social contract, then reenacted the conflict, which Rousseau sought (in vain) to overcome. Adam Smith and the growth of modern economic liberalism, the radicalism of the French revolution, and the conservative reaction of Edmund Burke subsequently marked the triumph of antipolitics, and the American Revolution may have offered the potential groundwork for a renewal of politics. Taken together, these historical examples, viewed through the prism of philosophy, reveal the roots of today's political climate and suggest the trajectory of the battles yet to come.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Oct 22, 2010
• ISBN: 9780231509756

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INTRODUCTION

Democracy and the Renewal of Political Thought

ALTHOUGH THE HISTORY of democracy began in Greece two and a half millennia ago, its enormous achievements contrast with its brief life. The great early political thinkers who tried to understand it—Plato and Aristotle—wrote after it had fallen prey to its own inner demons. The democratic desire for self-government reappeared in the Roman republic, which went on to conquer the Western world. But success again carried the germ of failure when social conflict led to a violent civil war, which concluded with the creation of an empire whose citizens no longer governed it. As with their Greek predecessors, the great Roman political thinkers who sought to explain republican political ideas—Livy and Cicero—were trying to understand a way of life that had expired. It was only after fifteen long centuries had passed that republicanism, with its potential for a politics of active citizen participation, was renewed in the Italian city-states of the Renaissance, particularly in Florence. And its greatest theorist—Machiavelli—was once again a defeated politician writing after republicanism’s moment had passed. It was only three centuries later that democratic political values reemerged in the American and the French revolutions, whose heirs we remain. Yet the achievements of modern democracy have not been unmixed, and its founding principles remain subject to conflicting interpretations.

History makes it clear that democracy is not the natural way men and women have chosen to govern themselves. Indeed, neither the American Revolution nor the French Revolution was made in the name of democracy. Only in the nineteenth century did democracy gradually come to be perceived as desirable, and it was only in the early twentieth century that Woodrow Wilson could justify America’s entry into a world war by claiming that the world would be made safe for democracy. But the Bolshevik leaders of the 1917 Russian Revolution that took place at the same time as that war claimed that their new state was the realization of a truly social democracy that was superior to the merely formal one that existed elsewhere. And in the years that preceded the outbreak of the Second World War, Italian fascism and German Nazism laid their own claim to democratic legitimacy by denouncing the bourgeois domination of Western democracy in the name of popular (or national) sovereignty. With the outbreak of the Cold War, two opposing systems, each claiming to represent the democratic will of the people, stood rigidly against one another, each contesting the other’s legitimacy.

At the end of the Second World War, only some 20 percent of the world’s nations could be considered democratic. Then the wave of decolonization in the 1960s suddenly created dozens of newly independent nations that claimed to be democratic. In the 1970s, another wave swept away dictatorships in Europe (Spain, Greece, Portugal), Latin America (Argentina, Brazil, Peru), and Asia (Indonesia, South Korea, the Philippines). Finally, in 1989, the wall fell in Berlin, and within two years the Soviet Empire was no more. Democracies were everywhere, it seemed. The twenty-first century is apparently destined to be the realization of what had begun in Greece two and a half millennia ago. History would have the fairy-tale ending for which humanity had waited so long. Indeed, some have gone so far as to talk about the end of history.

The omnipresence of democracy today has had the unfortunate effect of transforming what should be a question about the rarity of democracy and the difficulty of preserving it into an answer that is assumed to be applicable to any society, regardless of its history, economy, or political culture. This democratic self-certainty has become a trap. It blinds those who are convinced that they enjoy it to the tensions within their own society and to the danger of trying to export what they consider their own virtues. It is well and good, as George W. Bush asserted in his second Inaugural Speech, to have complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom … because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul. But confidence can breed overconfidence. America’s sad experience in Iraq; the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s difficulties in Afghanistan; the European Union’s inability to ensure peace and prosperity among its Balkan neighbors; the slide of Russia and other former Soviet states toward authoritarianism; the spread of religious fundamentalisms—all of these developments point to the necessity of learning to think about politics critically before appealing to truths that only seem to be self-evident. The twenty-first century is not an age for political complacency.

I

The fact that democracy’s greatest theorists wrote about it only after it had begun to disappear in their societies suggests that even when it exists, it and its republican cousin are not forms of political life that can be achieved once and for all. As the rule (kratos) of the people (demos), democracy is restless, active, and self-critical. These characteristics are its virtue, the source of its great achievements, and the root of the richness of democratic life. But democracy can become a threat to itself because it accepts no limits on the aspects of social, individual, and private life that it governs. The threat can be illustrated by looking at one of the basic values held by democratic citizens. Does the equality of all citizens refer only to formal equality before the law? Or does it extend to equal participation in elections to all offices? To the equality of material satisfactions? To equality among ethnic and religious groups? To gender equality? But if equality continues its unlimited expansion, does it begin to threaten the freedom that is also a principle of democratic life? The defense of liberty can lead to the same tendency to limitless growth, to the point that this growth may in turn threaten the principle of equality. This simple set of questions suggests some of the ways in which democracy can become a threat to itself and the reasons why it is such a rare historical phenomenon.

The familiar saying that the only cure for democracy is more democracy expresses a self-confidence that blinds democrats to the necessity of thinking about the principles that make democracy possible and how these principles may become a threat to its existence. That is why this book returns to the foundations of the Western political tradition, drawing on materials from the past that will permit the renewal of democratic thought from a democracy that has become so self-certain that it is in danger of losing the ability to criticize its own premises and to recognize its own limits. The rarity, value, and the precariousness of democracy become apparent when set within the broad outlines of the history of political thought. Most of the thinkers studied here were not democrats; they were responding to the political challenges of their own times with the conceptual tools of their times, just as the defenders of democracy sought to reply to their own era. That is why they all belong to the tradition of Western political thought that I am claiming can help renew our own modern democracy.

By the term political, I mean simply the way in which people decide to live together and to understand the legitimacy of their social relations. The crucial concept in this preliminary definition is legitimacy. Some members of the society always possess qualities that make them a dominant force and allow them to control others. If their power is to be more than violence, enforcing sullen obedience from a passive population, other members of the society must recognize and accept it. The latter must see the existing social relations as reflecting what they themselves have willed. They must agree, for example, that physical courage or the experience that comes with age or familial descent or well-schooled rational judgment or election to office by a majority of citizens is a criterion that qualifies a person or a group of people to govern them. At that point, what first appeared as the domination by brute force has become legitimate; it is now accepted as power, and the political leaders can rightly be said to have the authority needed to rule.

For long periods in Western history, the source of political legitimacy was located in the religious sphere. In one or another way, secular relations were justified as reflecting the sacred order. God’s will—however interpreted—provided a framework within which social relations acquired their legitimacy. This schema was effective because God was conceived as a transcendent power whose authority could not be questioned, however grim the social relations of the time might appear. What could be challenged was whether the secular powers—which included the institutional church as well as profane social institutions and the relations among these bodies—were adequate to carry out the divine mission. These institutions could and did change, but whatever secular forms were finally adopted, the source of legitimacy in monotheistic religious societies transcended them. In this way, the transcendent principles of religion created a political framework within which diverse forms of social relations could coexist. The competition of the secular and the sacred did not threaten the basic principle of political legitimacy that ensures the unity of society because it remained separate from and outside of that legitimacy. The long life that was thus guaranteed to religious society contrasts with the brevity of the democratic experience.

Because democracy is a form of self-government, it has to discover a principle of legitimacy that is imminent to society. Only in this way can it maintain a balance among the diverse interests that exist within the society while ensuring that this diversity does not prevent the preservation of social unity. In a religiously based political system, the divine is an always present but transcendent guarantor of unity that also permits a (minimal) degree of diversity. In a democratic society, however, there can be no such external source of legitimacy; the existence of such a source would limit the fundamental possibility for humans to govern themselves. That is why the principles of liberty and equality are so important to democratic societies, whose dynamism is maintained by the competition between the two. But the immanence of these two principles explains also why their extension is limitless; there is nothing outside them that can stop their restless advance, which, in turn, may lead them to contradict or conflict with one another. Democratic political institutions’ task is to ensure a peaceful coexistence between these two immanent principles. They can do so insofar as citizens recognize these institutions’ legitimacy. It is for this reason that democratic politics is the paradigm of successful modern and secular politics.

The democratic paradigm of political legitimacy is not identical with either liberty or equality; it establishes the conceptual (or constitutional) framework that makes their coexistence possible. The danger is that sometimes one and sometimes the other of these two basic values may appear to dominate; or, at still other moments, the two may annul one another. In both of these cases, democracy is then threatened from within. The history of the twentieth century provides a simple illustration. It appears to the capitalist that too much concern for social equality is a threat to the freedom necessary for economic innovation and social progress; as a result, politicians insist on the primacy of freedom while ignoring (or downplaying) the inequalities that result from the blind logic of the market. In reaction, socialists defend a politics that—in its extreme form, communism—uses the power of the state to impose equality with no concern for the individual (or social) liberty that is lost. The political compromise between these two poles is proposed by the welfare state, which Europeans call social democracy. Some in America see this compromise as producing the worst of both worlds; others identify positively it with the liberalism of the New Deal. In the global world of the twenty-first century, however, it has lost its efficacy as the nation-state loses control of large swaths of its autonomy. No one knows what will replace the seemingly stable political compromise that since the end of the Second World War has preserved the basic principles of democracy.

The problem of democratic legitimacy can be reformulated in terms of the twin values of unity and diversity. Political unity must be able to coexist with social diversity, plurality, and conflict. But unity goes together with universality, whereas diversity entails a concern with particularity. If, for example, the universality of the law is said to create a government of laws, not of men, are there to be no exceptions that take into account particular circumstances? Or if the appeal to nonpartisanship pretends that differences of opinion are only political, does this appeal show a disrespect for the right to be different? Does it tell people that their ethnic, sexual, and religious identities are not important and need not be taken seriously? What of the case where the defense of the national interest is said to justify violations of individual rights? Democracy again becomes a threat to itself, when it destroys its own basic values in order to save itself. It becomes an antipolitics.

The problem is that unity without diversity becomes either repressive or merely formal; it loses the creativity that arises from the competition of plural interests. That is why the separation of powers has been fundamental to democratic politics. Once again, however, the solution is unstable. The separation can become a rigid division that threatens the state’s ability to act decisively. A difficulty may appear when minority groups or defenders of individual rights assert themselves. At first, they may restore a healthy balance of unity and diversity, but when one of the interest groups that make up the diverse society begins to worry that another has gained too great a share of the power that rightfully belongs to the people as a whole, it will then claim that its duty is to reestablish the power of the people. If it succeeds, the power of all of the people will be replaced by the rule of some of them—who claim to act for the good of all, but who do so by excluding the others from participation. Unity will be restored, but democratic principles will have been replaced by another form of antipolitics.

It is important to recognize that the threat to democracy comes from within; the same principles of equality and liberty, unity and diversity, universality and particularity that explain democracy’s dynamism can become the source of its self-destruction. This threat is based on the fact that modern democracies do not enjoy a stability based on the transcendent guarantees of legitimacy found in religiously organized political societies. But that transcendence of the sacred that protects society from its own worst instincts also puts a limit on what can be accomplished in the secular world. The lack of limits is the source of the attractive power of democracy. Democratic societies are dynamic; their prosperity results from their refusal to rest content with their present achievements. Yet this same perpetual movement can be a source of an anguish that gradually eats at the democratic citizenry’s self-confidence. Now a new form of antipolitics can appear. What appeared to be a limit—the existence of a transcendent source of legitimacy—may bring comfort to the individual, who fears the loss of meaning in a godless world in which each person is responsible for creating the meaning of his or her life. This desire to be part of a greater whole is another reason that democracy is the rarest and the most threatened form of political life. Although some religious societies may have achieved some greatness that compels admiration, it is only when men and women govern themselves politically that they achieve the true autonomy that is the signal historical measure of democratic humanity.

II

The uniqueness of democratic self-government and the rarity of its historical appearances stand out against the background of the two and a half millennia of Western political history. Although democracy represents the exception within that history, it is also an essential part of it. In particular, the interplay between politics and antipolitics as manifested in the relation between unity and diversity necessary in any society forms a recurrent theme in this book. In the remainder of this introduction, I present a brief overview of philosophies covered in the book and the historical context in which they emerged. The purpose of this sketch is to underline the fact that the unity of political thought not only is defined by men and women’s attempt to live together without submitting to arbitrary force, but is also characterized by the diversity of the solutions to this reappearing problem and the constant presence of an antipolitical temptation to find a once-and-for-all solution to it.

Chapter 1 describes the emergence of democracy in Athens and the ideal portrait of it in Pericles’ funeral oration. Pericles understood that this democracy was not the expression of the natural way in which men and women (and slaves) had always lived together. He was speaking at the height of Athens’s glory, well aware of the way in which a series of complex political choices had gradually led from the heroic Homeric warrior-aristocrats to the participation of all (male and free) citizens in the decisions that governed their society. Yet one of these free decisions would lead to the Peloponnesian War, in which Sparta defeated Athens. Another led to the condemnation of Socrates for the supposed crimes of impiety and the corruption of youth. In this context, it is understandable that Plato’s great political theory, The Republic, is an attempt to demonstrate the legitimacy of a rational, united polity to replace the instability and impulsiveness that had led to the self-destruction of Athenian democracy. The Republic is the first full-fledged theory of antipolitics.

The vast sweep of Plato’s unitary theory demanded a response that would give plurality and diversity their proper place. This response was the task of Aristotle, Plato’s former student, who recognized that legitimacy could come only from a government in which all the classes of society participated. Aristotle based this proposal on his recognition that equality is not an absolute but a proportional value and that stability can be ensured only by the rule of a middle class. He knew, however, that his own solution left unresolved a basic political question: Will a good person, one who acts as a moral individual, also be a good citizen (and vice versa)? The source of the difficulty is the fact that individuals belong to many diverse associations, each of which has its own values. Although the political is the highest form of association because it is the most inclusive, the obligations imposed by membership in other associations cannot simply be neglected. Denial of the diversity of spheres of social life would produce an antipolitics.

This opposition between Plato as the theorist of unity based on an absolute and rational standard and Aristotle as the defender of diversity who understood rationality as the application of the proper measure to each particular object forms a recurring theme in the history of political thought. Before a theoretical synthesis between the two could be proposed, the conquests of Alexander the Great destroyed Greek independence. The political thought that had been expressed in the public sphere where all citizens could participate now turned inward; it became a new type of antipolitics. The Cynics denied the force of outside authority; the Epicureans accepted only such external content as pleased them; and finally, the Stoics synthesized these two tendencies. The significance of these three philosophical orientations lies in their rejection of the conflictual public sphere in favor of a unitary moral stance that concerns only the private person. Such moral comfort is a reaction to a situation in which political engagement seems impossible, although it can also be an excuse to avoid the risks of politics. The Stoic synthesis became important in late republican Rome, the stage on which latent democratic values reappeared after Greek independence was lost.

Roman historians’ analysis of the sources of Rome’s greatness expressed the self-understanding of the Roman republic. Livy, writing after the demise of the republic, which he regretted, reimagined its origins in order to explain the dynamic spirit that had animated it. Recounting the social conflicts that in barely fifty years had led from the abolition of monarchy to the creation of republican institutions, Livy illustrated the way this spirit presided over an institutional creativity that produced a political structure that could at once preserve unity and encourage diversity. He built on Polybius’s analysis of the way these institutions actually functioned—an analysis Polybius carried out at the height of republican power in his attempt to understand why Rome had become a world power, whereas his native Greece had remained caught up in the particular and parochial life of its small city-states. Livy pointed to the way that division, plurality, and institutional competition gave the republican spirit an expansive political power as each sector and each institution sought to make itself stronger in order to face others’ challenge. This competitive mixture of the institutions of government provided a dynamic that surpassed the more conservative mixing of social classes by which Aristotle had sought to achieve stability. But the new dynamic republic needed a principle of self-limitation, which Cicero, not incidentally the Roman heir to Greek stoicism, proposed nearly a century later.

The problem, however, was that Cicero’s republican political synthesis looked to the past, which made it impossible for him to propose realistic solutions to the civil war that engulfed Rome in his time. Theory that built on past glories was no help as Augustus’s creation of an empire made possible the Pax Romana that would rule the world for centuries even as it destroyed what remained of the republican desire for self-government. As in the wake of the Greek democratic experience, political thought now turned inward; morality replaced politics and found a home in the soul of the individual—in this case, the Christian. As the Gospel of Luke (2:1–7) recounts, Jesus was born in Bethlehem because his parents had returned there to be counted by census takers of the new Roman Empire. An epochal transformation began thereafter; the source of political legitimacy now lay in a transcendent God who had become immanent in the suffering of the Son before being transformed into the Holy Spirit. My Kingdom is not of this world, said Jesus (John 18:36), but the church and the believer were indeed of it. Political life continued, and political thought faced a new type of antipolitical challenge.

The task of a properly Christian political thought was to create a framework of meaning to hold together the sacred and the secular worlds. Saint Paul, whose mission to the gentiles began the creation of the church as a political entity, laid the basis for what came to be known as doctrine of the two swords, according to which the church was charged with the sacred while the state was responsible for the secular. Because God willed each of them, the relation between the two domains remained undetermined. It was only at the beginning of the fifth century that Saint Augustine proposed a theory that tried to establish the relation between the unitary City of God and the diverse City of Man. His use of the term civitas (city) and his frequent citation of Cicero underlined his political intent, and his reliance on a Platonic version of Christian theology suggested that his aim was to establish the fundamental unity of the two poles by subordinating the diversity of the secular to the unity of the sacred. But this theoretical solution could not be maintained in practice. How, for example, would the church deal with heretics? Conversely, how would it reply to the accusation that its morality of love and submission was responsible for the Roman Empire’s inability to defeat the invading barbarians who sacked Rome in 410?

During the time of the so-called Dark Ages, it was the church, in particular the cloistered monks, that maintained what remained of classical culture. But the secular gradually reclaimed its rights when Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman emperor in 800. The problem of the two swords now became acute as pontiff and emperor clashed repeatedly for political primacy. Their conflict came to a head in the Investiture Struggle of the eleventh century. The papal victory in this conflict had a paradoxical outcome. The church won control of its own institutions, but this same autonomy freed the state from its authority. A new synthesis had to be invented to rejoin what had been sundered. In a Christian society, the emerging secular state still needed the legitimacy offered by religious authority. And on its side, the church’s spiritual mission needed secular support. It is no surprise that the first crusade (1096) followed closely on the conclusion of the Investiture Struggle.

The rediscovery of the lost writings of Aristotle made possible the creation of a new theology that seemed capable of facing up to the practical problems of the secular society that was emerging from centuries of stagnation. The excessive weight that had been placed on the unitary Platonic theology had proved too heavy, so Saint Thomas Aquinas proposed an Aristotelian vision of the plural nature of the Creation, each of whose domains has its own proper type of legitimacy. On the secular side, Aquinas developed the stoic idea of natural law; on the religious side, he distinguished what belongs to divine grace from what remains in the power of men and thus subject to secular laws. In this way, he restored the harmony of the two swords. But the Thomist synthesis proved too powerful. It seemed to leave insufficient room for individual piety and the personal experience of the sacred; and its vision of a hierarchical natural world governed by its own inherent lawfulness left insufficient place for human freedom. The theoretical and the religious reaction to Thomas’s scholastic theology set the stage for the emergence of modernity inside and outside of the church.

The birth of modernity was slow, painful, unintended, and incomplete, but its effect was radical. Humans’ vision of the natural world changed, as did their idea of human nature. In the classical age, men had tried to understand the laws of nature in order to conform their reason to nature’s (or a divine creator’s) goals. Now it was human reason that had to provide the ends to which nature must be made to conform. This shift , identified with the Reformation and the Renaissance, anticipated the rebirth of democratic political thought. The virtues of the modern individual differed from those that had ennobled the Greek or the Roman citizen; they differed as well from those possessed by a member of the universal Catholic Church. Those premodern individuals were born into membership; the community and its values had priority, and freedom was needed only to do what ought to be done according to values that existed outside of and prior to the individual. In contrast, modern individuality exists prior to and independent of the community. The result of the shift was a modern freedom that brought with it a terrifying alienation from the world and from other men. The challenge for modernity was to conceive of a new political form that would unify individuals who are always in principle free to escape any bonds to which they do not freely consent.

The dilemmas of modernity became acute in both the religious domain and the political domain. In the sphere of religion, Martin Luther rejected the church’s doctrinal teaching, which he claimed had become too worldly, arguing that only faith and only Scripture offer the possibility of salvation. But if the individual’s relation to the divine depends on his faith (and God’s grace), coupled with his personal interpretation of the holy text, what would hold together the community of believers? Not surprisingly, Luther’s theological challenge to authority unleashed a rebellious torrent that threatened the established order, including his own new church. In the end, Luther could only vest power in the secular rulers and lodge the quest for salvation in the private sphere. It became John Calvin’s task to rethink the relation of the sacred to the secular. His alternative to Luther’s Platonic-Augustinian theology presented a modern, Aristotelian-Thomist theology. Calvin argued that the believer’s conscience functions as the mediator between heaven and earth. The Calvinist internalizes the divine commandments, to which he constantly compares his own behavior as he attempts to conform to them. In this way, Calvinist theology offered a template for what counts as legitimate social relations. As opposed to Luther’s reliance on the state, the new church would define the relation of the secular and the sacred. The one-sidedness of both arguments provided the foundation of a new type of antipolitics.

In the city-states that began to flourish in Italy in the fifteenth century, the republican desire for self-rule once again breathed the fresh air of the city. But the interlude was short-lived. Driven into exile, Machiavelli sought to understand its demise. He recognized that power must be used to maintain the stability of a society in which the initiative of the individual faced the uncertainties of fortune. But what can make this power legitimate? To many readers, the answer was simple: success. But this answer is an oversimplification. Machiavelli warned against the danger of confusing the way we live with the way we ought to live. Because there is no perfect or final solution to the problems of human coexistence in an uncertain world composed of individuals who are free from transcendent moral or religious rules, the legitimacy of power depends on the ability of those who exercise power to find the most economical use for it. Despite its title, The Prince recommends no single form of government; it analyzes a wide range of historical examples in order to understand the logic of political action. A similar concern governs Machiavelli’s other great political work, The Discourses on Livy, whose secular and republican sympathies make clear that the Florentine was not just a Machiavellian.

The Reformation challenged the framework of traditional political life. Religious wars broke out, culminating in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), which devastated the continent before the Treaty of Westphalia consecrated the secular state’s political autonomy. This autonomy faced its most serious challenge in England, where the absolutist monarch’s attempts to dictate religious matters provoked a civil war. The Protestant saints led by Oliver Cromwell overthrew the Crown and tried and beheaded the monarch before creating a republic, which soon degenerated into one-man rule called a protectorate until the old monarchy was restored. These abrupt reversals made it clear that political theorists had to find a new way to think about the unity of a divided society. The theological claims that justified the old absolutism had lost their legitimacy, and the spiritual autonomy that the Reformation had promised did not produce a stable political democracy.

Attention now turned to the implications of the ideal of modern individualism. Political theorists imagined the existence of a state of nature in which individual freedom had reigned prior to the creation of institutional social bonds. They assumed that no rational person would enter binding relations with others unless this natural freedom were preserved. This assumption led to the idea of a social contract that tries to define the terms on which individuals join together and accept reciprocal obligations established by laws applicable to all of them. The first great application of this idea was Thomas Hobbes’s attempt to explain the creation of a unified society governed by a single sovereign power whose absolute rule both guarantees the enforcement of all citizens’ equality before the law and preserves their private freedoms. In this way, individual rights and public equality are to be protected. This modern version of a unified society governed by a Platonic philosopher-king seemed to its critics, however, to produce unity at a price that modern individualist society could not accept.

John Locke proposed the equivalent of an Aristotelian response to Hobbes’s Platonic vision of politics. Locke’s version of the state of nature contained already existing, plural social interests. The political state was needed only as a referee to judge among these interests when they came inevitably into conflict because each individual judged for himself what was right. But Locke’s contractual theory protected inequalities that he assumed to be natural and therefore acceptable. It was perfectly consistent with his view that the English Bill of Rights enacted after the Glorious Revolution of 1689 did not guarantee the rights of individuals to social equality or to individual liberty, but rather protected only the liberty of the Parliament. For this reason, the English revolution was in fact a confirmation of the existing unequal social order against the usurpation of the restored monarchy. It prevented further development in the direction of a democratic society by restoring the social relations that had been disrupted by both absolutism and the revolution that abolished it.

The development of modern social contract theory concludes with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s republican version that is often said to have been one of the sources of the French Revolution of 1789. Rousseau proposed a synthesis of the two variants of contract theory. His Social Contract shares Hobbes’s goal of finding a way to impose unity on a society of individuals, but Rousseau argues for the strict rule of law against the potential arbitrariness of a monarch. Yet, like Locke’s work, his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality recognizes the existence of social plurality. By posing the question of inequality’s origins, Rousseau implied that inequality was the unnatural product of the existing political order. In this way, he returned to the classical idea that the political form of society is the cause rather than the effect of the social relations within that society. But his insistence on equality and on the liberty that it makes possible was a sign of his modernity. The unresolved mixture of these classical and modern political assumptions would clash in the French Revolution. The result would be a form of antipolitics that stepped forward with its own claims to legitimacy rather than remain simply the shadow side of politics.

Social contract theory ultimately failed to integrate the passions and the interests of the modern individual into a political community capable of reconciling equality with liberty, unity with diversity, theory with practice. This failure became evident at the end of the eighteenth century, when democratic political action reappeared on the stage of history. The same year, 1776, that witnessed America’s Declaration of Independence saw the publication of Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. It would be incorrect to interpret Smith’s path-breaking attempt to establish the foundations of a new science of political economy as a reaction to the American events, although both were opposed to the subordination of economic relations to the political demands of English mercantilism. But Smith’s coupling of politics with that aspect of life that was for the Greeks the domain of women and slaves and for the Christian the punishment for original sin was not fortuitous. The creation of wealth, on the basis of the increasing division of labor and with the help of an invisible hand by which market forces replace political choice, was an unintended result of modern individualism. It seemed to produce social unity without the need to appeal to politics. Now economic science began to replace contract theory as the foundation of a political unity built by blind market forces over which the individual had no control. Rather than reconcile equality and liberty, political economy legitimated a new type of inequality that was seen as the product of ineluctable economic necessity. Politics had no place in this new world; if it sought to interfere, it risked upsetting the market forces’ neutral action. The antipolitical implications of this argument are evident.

The quest for republican and democratic institutions reappeared in the years that followed the French Revolution. Although many of the revolution’s early protagonists sought to imitate the British model, the revolution itself escaped their grasp and took on a life of its own. After a series of internecine conflicts, a republic was declared in 1792, and further radicalization followed. The leading revolutionaries’ goal was to effectuate a social transformation that would eliminate the arbitrariness of politics. They seized state power as a means to remake social relations so that that there would no longer exist a difference between the political state and the society it was to govern. Their ideal can be seen as a modern version of Platonism. Its result would be what I call a democratic republic, in which republican unity is imposed on society in a way that leaves no room for democratic diversity. The French Revolution became antipolitical as a result. Once the revolutionaries had overthrown the old order, they had no way to set a limit on the equalization of social conditions that they had begun to establish. Where should they stop? If all difference were destroyed, what would remain? As if frightened by their own audacity, they decided that order must be restored. Doing so was the task of the Terror, led by Maximilien Robespierre. To overcome modern individualism, the Committee on Public Safety sought to impose the classical virtue that had founded ancient republican liberty. Although the Reign of Terror was short-lived, the new French republic—like its Roman ancestor—became a world empire under Napoleon, and the republican desire for self-government disappeared from its political life.

The founder of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke, predicted the failure of the revolution in his 1790 work Reflections on the Revolution in France. This new conservatism was a modern way of understanding the political, which represents a third form of antipolitics. Prior to the emergence of the modern individual and the idea that nature is neutral material to be used for ends dictated by humans, there was no need for a holistic, hierarchical, and backward-turned vision of the goals of politics. Although Burke appeared to be defending social plurality against the revolutionaries’ attempt to impose an abstract unity on society, his ideal was classical and Aristotelian. He returned repeatedly to the wisdom of tradition amassed through the ages, denouncing the abstract rationalism of the philosophes while showing that their lack of practical experience left them no option but to expand the reach of the state continually because that was the only political tool they understood. Burke rejected the individualist premises of both social contract theory and capitalist economics, arguing that the individual’s relation to the state cannot be compared to that of two merchants forming a contract to trade sugar and spices. But his vision of unity and harmony and especially of the power of tradition to bind the present to the past while giving meaning to the future was based on a rejection of the modern individualism that had made conservative theory necessary. This paradox condemns the conservative project. It is a modern theory, but it rejects the individualism that preserves the rights of diversity against the sweeping thrust of political or economic unification.

What unites these three reactions to the rebirth of the democratic and republican desire for self-government—the neutral logic of the market, state terror, and conservative traditionalism —is their rejection of it. Their thought is antipolitical. It is the search for a final solution to the perennial human problem of uniting freedom, order, and power by transcending all secular forms of political accountability. Glimpses of the antipolitical temptation had appeared in classical thought, particularly in the unitary rationalist tradition originated by Plato, which could be adapted to the religious legitimation of another style of antipolitics. But it was only with the emergence of the modern individual and the renewal of the republican and democratic quest for self-government that the antipolitical temptation became explicit as a mode of properly political understanding. As a reaction to the conditions that made modern democracy possible, this temptation argued that there are immanent constraints on citizens’ ability to ensure that their government is accountable to those in whose name it operates. For this reason, it was only at the end of the story recounted here that the tacit and latent implications of the steps along the way became clear. But the story was not over; the last die had not been cast.

The American Revolution is the living proof that antipolitics is not the modern answer to the age-old political problem of how men and women can live together under a government that is legitimate. Although Edmund Burke supported the American cause (because he saw it as the assertion of traditional British freedoms against arbitrary political intervention by Parliament), the implications of the colonists’ demands for the rights of an Englishman became more radical as the conflict deepened. After independence was declared, sovereignty had to be won not only on the battlefield, but by the creation of political institutions that could maintain it. The Articles of Confederation failed. The popular debates about the new constitution of 1787 were given their fullest theoretical formulation in The Federalist. Those eighty-five essays, published first in newspapers and then bound as a book, were more than a political polemic; without intending it, they mapped out the political theory of the republican democracy toward which the Americans were groping. The power of that political form was confirmed by the election of 1800, which brought Thomas Jefferson to power. For the first time in history, power passed peacefully from one political party to another, a feat whose foundation was the recognition that the republic was at once unified and yet divided. In 1803, the Supreme Court ruled in Marbury v. Madison that it was the Constitution rather than the temporary holders of office that represented the sovereign will of the people. This American republican democracy inverted the unitary democratic republic sought by the French. Its political framework protected civil rights, ensuring the competitive coexistence of diverse social interests rather than attempting to collapse them into a unified whole. In this way, it preserved the space for politics.

III

The U.S. Constitution does not represent the final and ultimate form of democratic political institutions. The republican democracy that it brought into being recalled both the greatness of the Roman republic and the glories of Greek democracy, but the American achievement was no more certain to endure than its Greek or Roman ancestors. Just as the Greeks and Romans’ successes led both of them to undertake imperial adventures that in the end cost them their freedom, so the Americans, already in the nineteenth century and more powerfully as the twentieth century was ending, had to face the demon that tempts those who are too successful. Other similarities appeared on the home front. For a time, the clash of the interest of freedom with the demand for equality produced a healthy competition that made each of them stronger, extending their reach ever more widely to embrace new domains. But too much of a good thing can become harmful. As Montesquieu, to whom the American founders referred frequently, observed in The Spirit of the Laws, even virtue needs to know its limits. An excess of reason, he added, can similarly be undesirable. But how is a people to limit itself if not by political means? And if it does not impose such limits on itself, can this be taken as a sign that antipolitics has come to power?

In recent American history, the faith in unbounded freedom has spread beyond the economic sphere to the broader domains of social relations, culture, and family. At the same time, equality has expanded to encompass class, ethnicity, and gender relations. The first part of the introduction described the logic governing this process. At the same time, American pretensions to virtue have led to attempts to spread American values throughout the globe, by force if need be. Each of these extensions of American ideals may be, for a time and in some cases, a positive achievement. At some point, however, they may come to threaten the very democracy that makes them possible. The difficulty is that we will know we have breached the limit only when it is too late to pull back. Better, then, to learn from the past rather than be blindsided by an onrushing future, as has happened previously in American history—most cruelly with the Civil War, more recently at the time of the Great Depression. The nation was lucky to find political leaders who understood politics and its limits. That luck may one day run out. Antipolitics lurks always in the shadows, disguising itself as political wisdom or practical expediency.

The historical trials and contemporary dilemmas of American democracy are not the direct theme of this book, but I hope that practical and engaged readers will ask themselves, in the words of Vladimir Lenin, What is to be done to preserve, improve, and renew the democracy that we have inherited? They will recognize the inadequacy of the definition of politics offered by that Bolshevik leader in the famous aphorism kto kogo (who does what to whom). Building from the storehouse of human experience, they will rethink anew the nature of politics. For my part, in the brief conclusion to this volume, I suggest some themes gleaned from the history of political thought that, as I see it, might contribute to a renewal of democracy in the twenty-first century.

THE RISE AND FALL OF ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY

AFIRST OVERVIEW of the basic difference between the Platonic and Aristotelian understanding of the tasks of political thought suggests that Plato’s philosophical presuppositions incline him toward antipolitics, whereas those of Aristotle lend themselves more easily to properly political thought. But the contrast is not absolute. An historical account of the origins of Athenian democracy and the realization of its ideals at the height of its glory during the Age of Pericles adds nuance to this schematic presentation of two of the basic categories that organize this history of political thought. Beginning with the Greek cultural ideals presented in the poetry of Homer and Hesiod, this background casts light on the improbable process by which Athens gave birth to both democracy and philosophy. The fact that no other civilization produced such an unlikely combination is one reason why Greek political thought stands at the foundation of more than two thousand years of Western civilization.

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Plato seeks to define the unequivocally best constitution, whereas Aristotle recognizes the need to take into account the conditions in which ordinary men and women can best live together. As a result, Plato can be said to propose the replacement of politics with political philosophy; his political theory is antipolitical because it eliminates the need for the negotiation and compromises that make political choices legitimate in the eyes of the participants. The attraction of the ideal—the promise of a fully rational society and a theory that encompasses particularity within a universal framework—has reappeared in the many historical renewals of Platonism. This idealism is attractive to the social critic as well. The universality of its claims permits a critique of any particular status quo, denouncing the self-deceptions, illusions, and interests that mislead the citizens. But what may appear to the idealist as self-deception or worse may be in fact a realistic evaluation of the chances available to people attempting to realize their idea of the good life within the constraints of the world as it exists here and now. At this point, Aristotle’s philosophy seems to offer a practical political alternative. His recognition of the complexity of political life leads him to undertake comparative empirical analyses that provide a complement to Platonic idealism. In the real world, he seems to suggest, the best may be the enemy of the better. Philosophy cannot replace politics. The task of political thought is to develop the prudence and judgment needed to live in a world peopled by diverse men and women who seek to maintain the unity and legitimacy of their social relations.

This initial opposition between Plato’s stress on the ideal and Aristotle’s insistence on the real has further political implications. As philosophers, both are searching for truths that are universal. Plato starts from the universally true in order to understand and criticize ever-changing particular experience. This approach leads him to distinguish sharply between appearance and reality, opinion and knowledge, belief and truth. Aristotle takes the opposite tack, beginning from the diversity of particular phenomena in order to generalize toward increasingly universal forms of knowledge. This strategy leads him to try to find reality in the experienced world, to seek knowledge through deliberation, and to take seriously the opinions that motivate humans to act.

The distinction between the two philosophers can be seen in their method of procedure. Plato’s reasoning is a priori; its validity does not depend on factual confirmation any more than do the truths of mathematics. And just as mathematical truths apply to the real world, so too Plato’s idealism does not mean that his claims are divorced from reality. Aristotle’s theory is a posteriori; its validity depends on empirical demonstrations and practical distinctions that support its claims as his argument